President Biden just signed a bipartisan USPS reform bill into law.
Is it too soon to celebrate the idea that the Post Office is saved?
Is Louis DeJoy still Postmaster General?
Need to get the new people in place first, but it’s coming.
Forcing employees to take medicare at 65 sucks. Everyone is required to sign up for part A at 65, but part B costs money.
It’s great, but as I understand it, the legislation didn’t come before DeJoy signed a contract obligating the USPS to purchase mostly fossil fuel-driven vehicles to upgrade their fleets. Biden and Dems wanted a fleet of primarily electric vehicles.
The reason Republicans supported the bill is because they were able to throw the sop to the fossil fuel industry. It wouldn’t have been bipartisan – or possible, thanks to Manchin – unless this contract was allowed to stand. This part of the legislation is awful, IMO. I’m good with the rest of it.
Just how immovable are contracts like this? I read stories from time to time about this big contract or that big contract getting canceled. IIRC, sometimes they are multi-year deals for some number of trucks, or fighter jets, or border fencing, or whatever, to be delivered on some schedule over many years, and then they sometimes get canceled. Is that a thing? Could this contract be like that?
And yeah, whythefuck is DeJoy still there? Doesn’t the USPS Board have the power to kick his ass out? And don’t Democrats have the majority there now?
I don’t know re whether the contract can be canceled or modified. I hope so. I expect the Biden Administration and the Dems decided they’d take what they could get and hope for a better bargaining position after the mid-terms.
Re the situation with getting rid of DeJoy, It appears Republicans are stalling the approval process of Biden’s replacement nominees for 2 seats on the USPS Board that has the power to fire DeJoy.
Here’s a better description from what should be a familiar source:
It’s an editorial, but under-girded by factual information.
I wonder. If the Dems could get Ketanji Brown Jackson through the grist mill, why not this the same way?
Contracts will often have cancellation penalties. Since postal vehicles are custom-built (rather than adapted from a normal commercial vehicle), those penalties could reasonably be pretty steep. If you think you’re going to be supplying X vehicles over 10 years and you start building out production facilities and stuff and then a year into the contract when you’ve maybe supplied X/20 vehicles the other side wants to cancel… you’ve probably spent way more than the 1/20th of the amount you’re going to spend, so it’s reasonable to require a hefty penalty to cancel.
So if they cancel very early in the contract – like Real Soon Now – before they’ve barely started the design/construction process, could they get out on the cheap?
Depends entirely on what the contract says and what the laws are. Consult an expensive lawyer.
Why do you say that? The editorial itself provides zero cites for its information.
Please feel free to cite any non-factual information you find there with factual cites you wish to provide. It’s not on me to refute information in my cites which you, for whatever reason, choose to doubt.
I could have selected any of half a dozen links that state the same information. I just liked citing one from the Chicago Sun Times.
I’m sorry, but an editorial is not a cite, by definition.
An actual news article is.
“Here’s what the Sun-Times thinks about X” vs. “Here’s the facts about X”.
Yes. And you are free to accept or reject the information on that basis, as you like.
People forget the bill that put the Post Office in that situation in the first place was entirely bipartisan, no nays at all from the Democrats. Who knows if something like that happens again.
Are there any companies ready to make hundreds of thousands of electric postal vehicles? I doubt it. And even if these vehicles existed today, the USPS would have to add the recharging infrastructure to local post offices. That’s going to take a long time. Moving to electric postal vehicles is a good idea, but it’s something that’s going to take some time.
Remember the vehicle contract was signed February 23, 2021:
Joe Biden was President then. He could have put the word out that there would be no Postal Reform bills and other bad things would happen if this kind of contract was signed.
The overwhelming majority of that infrastructure is already in place: Everywhere already has electricity. No lines need to be run, only new connections to plug chargers into. My understanding is that you basically just need an appliance outlet for each charger, like you’d plug a refrigerator or washing machine into. A modest and straightforward job for any individual post office, or even homeowner, for that matter. (It’d be a friggin’ bonanza for electricians, no doubt. The world should be that anyway. Electricity is the way.)
Not nothing, but really a pittance compared to what people think of when they think of replacing gas infrastructure.
All this shamelessly stolen from some video I saw just last night that was posted in a different thread here. The basic point of which was, if you buy an electric vehicle, you should also be spending a couple grand to buy a charger and have an electrician install it in your garage. Plug it in at night, wake up every single day with a full tank of gas. In other words, in day-to-day life, you will never go to a gas station again. And other than long highway trips, your car will only ever be charged at your house each night.
More on topic, this is DeJoy’s 10-year plan, right? My assumption is that every bit of that plan is toxic, and that sticking with fossil fuel vehicles for a full rebuild – an absolute world of suck – is how bad every bit of it will be. I wouldn’t put the unthinkable past him, where they drop the guarantee of delivering mail to everyone. (There are addresses private companies won’t deliver to because it’s too remote, not profitable enough. The post office doesn’t have that luxury.)
I’m so pissed that he’s still there.
In my mind I’d like to read the plan, but it’s probably a billion pages long and my eyes would glaze over halfway through the first paragraph.